‘Robert Menendez’s Wife Killed Someone’: Lawrence O’Donnell Delivers Scathing Takedown Of the ‘Sickeningly Perverse’ Menendezes
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell delivered a scathing monologue about Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife Nadine Menendez on Wednesday, after it was revealed the latter killed a man while driving her car.
Federal prosecutors say that incident served as the impetus for one of the bribes the senator received.
In 2018, Nadine, who was then the girlfriend of the senator, hit and killed a pedestrian in Bogota, New Jersey. A police report from the time said she was driving a Mercedes-Benz and killed 49-year-old Richard Koop while she was driving alone.
The fatal collision came to light on Wednesday in a report by the New York Times, which noted that after “brief questioning,” police concluded she was not at fault. A witness at the time stated the officers at the scene “appeared to know” who she was and “treated her with striking deference.”
The senator, his wife, and three associates were indicted last month on federal corruption charges. A raid of the Menendezes home last year turned up nearly $500,000 in cash and gold bars.
Prosecutors allege the couple was so eager to replace the damaged Mercedes, the senator attempted to quash an unrelated criminal prosecution of one of his co-defendants in exchange for a $60,000 Mercedes convertible.
During Wednesday’s Last Word, O’Donnell excoriated the couple.
“The breaking news of the day is that Robert Menendez’s wife killed someone,” he reported before showing a clip of a reporter asking the senator about the incident.
“That was a tragic accident and obviously we think of the family,” Menendez said.
The remark set O’Donnell off:
He’s lying. They don’t think of the family. They have never communicated with the dead man’s family in any way. In December of 2018, Robert Menendez’s girlfriend, who was on her way to becoming his second wife, hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street at 7:30 p.m. and killed him. His name was Richard Koop. He was 49 years old.
The New York Times reports today, “His body was thrown to the curb just steps from his home and badly mangled… The police reports indicate she was never tested for drugs or alcohol, and was allowed to leave the scene, not long before Mr. Koop was declared dead at a nearby hospital.” Richard Koop’s sister told the New York Times, “The family really has had serious concerns over what we felt was a very sparse, one-sided investigation… We felt that the whole thing was very silently swept under the rug.”
The only problem Mrs. Menendez seemed to face after she killed someone was how to replace that damaged car. According to federal prosecutors, Robert Menendez and his wife took a bribe in the form of a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz C 300 convertible to replace the damaged car. The indictment of Robert Menendez and his wife contains a text message from her, saying, “All is GREAT! I’m so excited to get a car next week!”
The indictment says she told the man who was bribing them that she would “never forget this.”
So, you’ve killed a man with a car, and you are so excited to get a car next week – not even slightly traumatized about driving, not in any way. And the thing you say you will never forget is the bribe that got you the car, not the man you killed.
The indictment contains a text message that seemed creepy enough when all we knew it was describing was an alleged bribe. But now that we know that it is the reward Mrs. Menendez got after killing someone, it reads as sickeningly perverse. She wrote to New Jersey’s senior senator, “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.”
She got that car only because she killed someone with her previous car. And she calls herself a “proud owner” of the new car. The bribe car.
And while she’s at it, she congratulates her future husband – the senator – for taking what federal prosecutors call a bribe, for which they are now both criminal codefendants who have pleaded not guilty.
Watch above via MSNBC.
